Reaching the senior level in your career often requires demonstrating certain skills and qualities that set you apart. One key area that can significantly boost your chances is mentoring and coaching. In this article, we’ll explore five tips on how to develop and showcase these skills, ultimately helping you make that leap from an intermediate to a senior role.
When I talk to my team about making that next step I often mention mentoring and coaching skills. Being able to go and take what you know and help somebody else learn that too. What’s tough about this is that if you’re not Senior yet it can be tricky to convince others that you should be their mentor or coach.
Tip #1: Help junior team members
If you have some junior members on the team, this is a great opportunity for you to be able to help them as they are starting on their career and also help you with learning about coaching. Junior team members will often depend on guidance from more experienced team members.
Tip #2: Help with onboarding
One way to prove your mentoring ability is by helping out with the onboarding process for someone new that is coming into your team or company. These folks are looking around for any help they can get, scrambling for guidance. That’s an opportunity for you to step in and help out! You can really practice your mentoring skills and show that you have what it takes.
Tip #3: Project collaboration
Another option is teaming up on a project. If you notice someone struggling a bit with something you are skilled at, you can step into the role of mentor in the project. Work together, get them levelled up. That can really show that you’re able to bring other members of the team up along with you.
These first three types of opportunities aren’t necessarily always available. They often depend on having junior team members.
Tip #4: Share your expertise
One thing that you can do is focus on an area of expertise and share it! Maybe you’re really good at editing videos or writing articles. Maybe you have learned everything you need to know about generative AI or GitHub Copilot. Whatever it is, once you’ve mastered it you can share that with the whole team, levelling everybody up. This is another way that a manager can look and say hey this person really knows how to go and make this team better.
Tip #5: Join the community
If you aren’t able to find opportunities on your current team, another way that you can do this is to go out into the professional community that you’re a part of. Maybe it’s a bunch of SQL developers or, in my case, it would be a lot Sitecore developers working at partners or customers.
There are always folks who could use a hand. Maybe they just need a little bit of guidance on how to get started! Share your expertise, help others, and show that you’ve got what it takes to build up a team.
Are you trying to go through this now? Hey, leave a comment, I’ll try to help out!
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